Businesses and other organizations dealing with the management of data have generally followed a trend of requiring increasing amounts of computing power and digital storage to organize and process ever-expanding pools of data. Not surprisingly, many of these organizations dealing with high volumes of digital data processing have expressed a need for high-powered, economical computing devices that can be adapted to perform specific tasks and that are hot-swappable in case of failure.
These needs have led to the emergence of new technology relating to the aggregation and storage of multiple computing devices. One development that has become particularly popular in recent years is that of the blade device. A blade device is a self-contained computing device designed for a specific data processing task, such as high-density data storage. Typically, a blade device includes at least one or more processors and electronic memory mounted on a single, hot swappable board. Power, cooling, networking, and access to peripheral devices (e.g. hard drives, etc.) are typically provided to the blade device by a blade enclosure designed to house multiple blade devices. The blade device enclosure may also house power supplies, cooling devices, electrical power connections, data interconnections, and peripheral I/O devices that communicate with the blade devices.
Early generations of blade devices and corresponding enclosures solved some data center problems by increasing density and reducing cable count. However, they also introduced other issues. For example, typical blade device enclosures do not provide much flexibility in the configuration or size of blade devices that the enclosures are designed to accommodate. Furthermore, data interconnections provided by blade device enclosures to the blade devices may be inefficient and/or of a slower than an optimal data rate for a particular blade device.
Throughout the drawings, identical reference numbers designate similar, but not necessarily identical, elements.